Archive for April, 2014

Master Tony had enjoyed such a wonderful time playing kings and queens, knights and dames with his super new friends, William and Kathee…why, his pa Rupert and dearest uncle, Sir David Flounce O.A.P. , had pulled off a really ripping Easter hols!!! Hoooorahhhh!!! Hip, hip!!!

Look, they uhmm…they came all the way to see meee, all the way to see meee fwom London in Engulund!!! Weee had gwate fun and me and William wrestled and played games…I want, I want lots of castles and servants…I want servants and banquets and horseys and army people, just like William…and, and, and a, a , a crown…a big, big crown when I gwow up!!!

Tony was so excited…he and his mate snotty-Scotty put on the soldier-dress-up-stuff that William had left them as a parting gift and headed back out into the playground…

“Come on Tony, come on quick!!! Quick..” snorted snotty-Scotty… “I can see some stwange childwennn that are, yeuchhhh….who are not from here…they’re howible…’nd weally, weally stwange and stinky….let’s get them!!! Chaaaarge!!!”

Tony thinks that Scotty is really big and tough and that he is brilliant at scaring off poohy strangers…He remembers the big, loud aeroplanes from the recent fly-pasts, too…

Wait for me, Scotty, I’ve got my planes…my aeroplanes are the best…the best in the whole world ever…I wanna do more airplanes…neeeyahhhh, uuuuuuu….uuuu…aiwoplayyyyynzzzz…and, and, and dwop bombs on them…those nasty weirdos…haha-hahahahhh…Myyyy daddd…my dad’s told me that I can play Top Gun with $26,000,000,000 of ordinary peoples’ stupid old money!!! So there.

North Korea is truly a totalitarian state … It is not content to take control of the physical lives of the citizens, it has to intrude into their way of thinking, into their attitudes to government … [It implements] the system of characterising citizens according to their loyalty to the government and the party. This is truly a state without any real equivalent in the modern world.

Michael Kirby

The UN-mandated inquiry team says the country’s leadership should be hauled before at the International Criminal Court:

…the inquiry found that pregnant women are starved, while their babies are fed rats and snakes; more than 100,000 people are in gulags; there is systematic torture; everyone is forced to inform on each other; entire communities are denied adequate food; and the bodies of the dead are burned and then used for fertiliser.

The commission of inquiry says all abuses have been sanctioned and enforced by the government of Kim Jong-un….

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Thomas Piketty is no radical. His 700-page book Capital in the 21st Century is certainly not some kind of screed filled with calls for class warfare. In fact, the wonky and mild-mannered French economist opens his tome with a description of his typical Gen X abhorrence of what he calls the “lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism.” He is in no way, shape, or form a Marxist. As fellow-economist James K. Galbraith has underscored in his review of the book, Piketty “explicitly (and rather caustically) rejects the Marxist view” of economics.

But he does do something that gives right-wingers in America the willies. He writes calmly and reasonably about economic inequality, and concludes, to the alarm of conservatives, that there is no magical force that drives capitalist societies toward shared prosperity. Quite the opposite. He warns that if we don’t do something about it, we may end up with a society that is more top-heavy than anything that has come before — something even worse than the Gilded Age…

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Like buying a house, it’s easy to get a free trade agreement if you don’t care what you get or how much you pay. Since coming to office, Prime Minister Tony Abbott has closed a number of free trade agreements in record time, and it shows.

The so-called free trade agreement with Japan ensures Australia will not be able to export a single grain of rice to that country. Some tariffs will fall slightly, over the next 18 years, and many tariffs and quotas remain in place. It doesn’t sound very free, does it?

You should be able to write a free trade agreement on a single page. The key sentence would be “there will be no restrictions on trade between Australia and Japan”. But of course these documents often top 1000 pages because that’s how long it takes to spell out all of the exceptions and exemptions.

But don’t worry about the details, modern politics is about symbolism. Signing a fat document that lists all of the restrictions on trade between us and Japan is a good look as long as you do it at the Emperor’s house and call it a free trade agreement. It’s a pretty safe bet that no one will ever read it.

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SPIEGEL ONLINE: You and others are launching a global campaign to ensure the legal protection of Web users’ rights internationally. What would you include in your personal Magna Carta for the Web?

Tim Berners-Lee: First, I would like us to have that conversation together. That is why we created webwewant.org. I want us to use this year to define the values that we as Web users are going to insist on. I would like every country to debate what that means in terms of their existing laws. In what areas must we enhance our regulations to guarantee fundamental rights on the Internet? The right to privacy must be in there, the right not to be spied on and the right not to be blocked. The commercial marketplace should be completely open. You should be able to visit any political website apart from the things that we all agree are illegal, nasty and horrible. Access to the Web is, of course, a fundamental right…

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Steve Hickman, Psy.D., Executive Director of the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness joins William Mobley, MD, PhD for a discussion of how to be present in the moment and leverage the practice of mindfulness to stay engaged, focused, and fulfilled.

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… Tunisia, political equilibrium but what about the economy? Ukraine special report;middle Venezuela takes to the streets; Cambodia’s peasants revolt; India considers voting for Modi; Algerians move on; will theScots vote for independence? employment and the EU, special report… Mexico, art on a grand scale, and more…

Frustrated by politics of obstruction and deference when our nation needs serious democratic leadership and action – and with our respective books on America both coming out on April 8th, we decided to consider the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our nation’s longest serving president, indeed, the greatest president of the Twentieth Century. And after much deliberation, we offer here the Top Ten Reasons FDR was Hot.

Enjoy and stay strong – We have nothing to fear but fear itself!

~~Harvey J. Kaye & Nomi Prins

1) FDR was hot because instead of talking “hope and change” – and playing blame-game politics – he signed 15 major bi-partisan bills in his first 100 days as President and turned alphabet soup into powerful, stabilizing New Deal agencies like the SEC, the CCC, the WPA, and the NLRB during a Great Depression.

2) FDR was hot because he always walked arm-in-arm – and even when he was sitting down he was standing up for America.